I've spent almost my entire career as a journalist covering tech in and around Silicon Valley, meeting entrepreneurs, executives and engineers, watching companies rise and fall (or in the case of Apple, rise, fall and rise again) and attending confabs and conferences. Before joining Forbes in February 2012, I had a very brief stint in corporate communications at HP (on purpose) and worked for more than six years on the tech team at Bloomberg News, where I dived into the financial side of tech. Before that, I was Silicon Valley bureau chief for Interactive Week, a contributor to Wired and Upside, and a reporter and news editor for MacWeek. The first computer game I ever played was Zork, my collection of now-vintage tech T-shirts includes a tie-dye BMUG classic and a HyperCard shirt featuring a dog and fire hydrant. When I can work at home, I settle into the black Herman Miller Aeron chair that I picked up when NeXT closed its doors. You can email me at cguglielmo@forbes.com.

AT&T's Big Call: Randall Stephenson On The iPhone, His Wireless Ambitions, And The Next Big Thing

When Randall Stephenson took over as CEO in 2007, AT&T Inc. was at a turning point.

Stephenson’s predecessor Ed Whitacre, at the helm of then SBC Communications, had gone on a successful buying spree that included the takeover of Pacific Telesis, Southern New England Telecommunications Corp., Ameritech, Comcast Cellular, AT&T Corp. and BellSouth. By 1996, Cingular Wireless, a joint venture of SBC and BellSouth, was also folded into the company now christened AT&T. “It was all with the intention of getting as big as we could on the wireless side as soon as possible,” recalls Whitacre, who handpicked Stephenson to succeed him and retired in June 2007, just 26 days before the iPhone went on sale in the U.S. “You had a sense inside of you of this having the possibility of being big, the technology serving a large number of people. It wasn’t just about a device.”

Until it was about the device, namely the iPhone. For Stephenson, a longtime SBC Communications executive working to integrate the disparate corporate cultures into the new AT&T and compete with rival Verizon Wireless, the deal with Apple was a singular opportunity to rebrand Ma Bell both externally and internally. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment to change how the public views AT&T as a wireless company, and to change internally how we view AT&T, a wireless company,” Stephenson remembers telling his team.

It’s been six years since Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and named AT&T the exclusive service provider for his cool new smartphone (an exclusive that ended last year). For Apple, the move into smartphones was the next step in its shift to consumer-electronics juggernaut from maker of Macintosh computers. Jobs, in fact, announced the name change from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. when he unveiled the iPhone and AT&T’s distribution deal on Jan. 9, 2007.

For AT&T’s Stephenson, the iPhone was the device that remade the carrier from plain old telephone service company to next-generation wireless provider. In the process, a company known for moving at glacial speed and for being closed off to outsiders took on the attributes of a modern technology innovator, like Apple itself. And it also set the tone for Stephenson’s leadership.

“When Randall came in and said ‘We’re a wireless company’ that sent shockwaves through some employees,” says AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega, who helped broker the iPhone deal at a time when most of AT&T’s sales were from its wireline or traditional phone business. “When you put that mandate with the iPhone and the transformation – I thought it was pivotal to helping AT&T pivot to being a wireless company. And it started with Randall and him giving us the go ahead to do the iPhone…the rest is history.”

Stephenson sat down with me in November in his office atop Whitacre Towers, AT&T’s corporate headquarters in Dallas, for an hour-long interview for a Forbes magazine story. We talked about the iPhone, how Apple’s devices helped transform AT&T’s corporate culture, his frustration with Washington regulators after his bid for T-Mobile was quashed and his mantra to “mobilize everything.” Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Q: Let’s talk about the wireless revolution that AT&T has been a part of under your tenure.

We’ve seen bigger revolutions – electricity, combustion engines. But not one that has gone as fast as this one has gone or been as transformative as this one has been.

I knew we had reached critical mass on this when Ed Whitacre, my predecessor, sent me a text message that said “How r u?” He didn’t even use email when he was CEO. (Whitacre tells me he did use email at home. ‘I was not totally literate but I was not illiterate either.’ As an aside, he also says one of his favorite iPhone apps today is a game called Ants Smasher.)

Q: Where does the AT&T wireless story begin? For a lot of people, it starts with the iPhone.

If you kind of reflect back, we were set on this course hard in the mid-90s. Whitacre had kind of the first vision of wireless and the benefits of wireless.

In 1996, Whitacre brought me back from Mexico and one of my first responsibilities was — I was working for the CFO — to put together a long-range view of the world, where was our industry going. Keep in mind we were just on the throws of doing the PacTel deal. We were just starting this big consolidation, right, to buy PacTel. Everybody said you bought PacTel, then you bought Ameritech and you bought SNET. We were just beginning that process. We said you’re going to have to have scale in this industry.

I was asked to put together this long range view of where is this industry is going. And we tend to be wireline centric around here. That was kind of our mindset, right… But to take this on, I wanted to find somebody outside the industry who would come in and help me frame this view of where the world was going. So I brought this guy in who used to run Braxton Consulting…He came in and we put together this view of the world. And it was a view of the world that said your wireline business is about to be dramatically cannibalized by wireless. And wireline business meant voice at that time. There was no such thing as wireless data. This was 1996.

We had these forecasts as to how much of that utilization was going to be basically migrating to wireless. There was a bit of a denial at that time. I reflect on it and it’s really almost comedic — that there’s no way you could have that much volume shift to wireless and so. But that was the first time I stepped back and said I think this is where this industry is going.

And what’s really comical about it is this individual that I brought over to do that work in 1996 is John Donovan (who joined AT&T as CTO in 2008 and now serves as SVP of AT&T Technology and Network Operations.)

Q: So how close were you?

You look back about 2006, 2007 when I was assuming responsibility, that view we put together in 1996 was a 10-year view. Obviously it wasn’t dead on, but directionally it was really close to where this thing happened. Very close. In fact I would say more of the traffic shifted to wireless than even we anticipated over that 10-year time horizon.

Now you come forward to 2006-2007, and the world of data was exploding. And we were really just at a point where the only thing that was moving to wireless in the data world was email, your Blackberry. Right? The data world was shifting to wireless, but it was really…it wasn’t a ton. But the world of email was becoming a wireless world. So in 2006, Cingular – we were all talking about we have to build this data capability.

I think we all believed it was going to be important. I don’t think we had an appreciation for just how important it could become. Till 2007 when we launched the iPhone.

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Fantastic interview. Enjoyed the general insights of Mr. Stephenson along with the quick refresher of mobile history. As a shareholder, glad to hear about the company’s change in attitude towards development.